OFFICIALS

With their bickering and eye-rolling, their tantrums and tirades, City Council members have become stars of a biweekly soap opera that could be called City Hall Blues.

Lyle Sumek, a consultant who spent last week with city officials, said the antics must stop.

"There's an African saying, 'When the elephants fight, only the grass suffers,'" he said. "When the council fights, it sets a tone and the community suffers."

At full-day workshops on Friday and Saturday, Sumek led council members and city department heads through a series of exercises designed to help them bridge their personal conflicts and build a plan for the future.

The result:

-- Eight long-term goals, such as promoting community and personal safety and protecting the environment.

-- Seventeen short-term priorities, such as expanding the library and its services.

-- Sixteen "house rules" to reduce the theatrics of council meetings, such as avoiding inflammatory remarks and respecting other viewpoints.

The council-devised game plan is a first for the city. In the past, the council has focused on responding to staff and constituent requests, not on charting plans for the city's future.

Council member Betty Holland said that unlike other so-called "visioning processes" the workshop may quickly produce tangible accomplishments.

"The difference with this is, we had all the people here who are needed to take action," she said.

Mayor Bill Smith also was enthusiastic. "This has helped us focus our thinking and has given us more concrete goals to work toward," he said.

Council member Esther Dance was the only council member who had a tepid response.

"Nothing new came out of it," she said. "We had some discussions, but the ideas were already out there."

Still at issue is whether council members will be able to work together and with city employees to meet these newly articulated goals.

The workshops brought to the surface some simmering tensions. City Manager Donna Dreska told council members to be more courteous to employees. She said that employees sometimes feel "persecuted and intimidated" at council meetings, particularly when put in the middle of council member debates.

"I have paid city staff to do their homework and they ought to have done their homework," Dance responded. "It shouldn't be scary."

But Dreska said it has to be acceptable for staff members to say "I don't know," because they cannot always anticipate all possible questions.

Council members also had plenty of criticism for each other. They chided each other for using inflammatory language, for making faces, for whispering during meetings and for rudeness in general.